The Day Of The Dead Festival 2014 at The Bargehouse, Oxo Tower from 30th October to 2nd November. The exhibition will present recent works from a host of contemporary artists, each with associated Day of the Dead themes. The festival includes works by; Graciela Iturbide, Jordan Baseman, The Drawing Exchange, James Ostrer, The Chapman Brothers and Juan Jose Rivas & Johnnie Shand Kydd

A Shrine to Dissent

A Shrine to Dissent is a participatory and accumulative installation work, which builds through social drawing events that focus on the dead’s dissent: a gift to the living. The shrine will begin as a geodesic skeletal structure, massing into a collective shrine made from participants’ drawings and assemblages. Finally the shrine will be socially dismantled in a Drawing Exchange ceremony where participants can swap and barter their drawings.

The drawing events will focus on the value of dissent. Looking at political, social dissenters whose non-agreement to the status quo or living ‘misfit lives’ enabled greater freedoms to the living. Drawing events will include a Thames drift, visits to Highgate East, Cross Bones, Bunhill Fields and Abney Park cemeteries and social drawing back at the shrine.

Throughout the festival, visitors to the Shrine to Dissent will be able to make their drawn offering.

Outing Drawing Event Times and Locations:

Join us at the following locations for social drawing events. Some equipment provided, but please bring your own too. Everyone welcome, regardless of drawing ability.
All events are free, (apart from Highgate East entrance fee).

Join us as we explore the reoccurring and evolving themes of dissent through Abney Park Cemetery. From the chapel’s architectural style of Dissenting Gothic through the myriad lives of the dissenting buried within this beautiful and strange nature reserve.

Friday 31st Oct, 3–6pm: Beyond the Gates

Bunhill Fields to Crossbones – Day of The Dead Meet 3 pm, Bunhill 38 City Road, London EC1Y 1AU 3PM ‎
Howl away the hours descending to dusk with a walking drift from one special site of the dead dissenter to another. Bunhill Fields, a former burial ground and now public park, was once known as ‘The Campo Santo of Dissenters’ and favoured by Nonconformists. It famously contains the graves of John Bunyan, William Blake and Daniel Defoe and many more radicals. We’ll walk through the city to find Crossbones a site of non-conformity and local importance where a memorial gate pays dues to the paupers and prostitutes buried within.

Highgate East Cemetery is renowned as the resting place for many socialists and a refuge for the wild. Amongst the fox holes and wild plants lies Karl Marx, next to him, Claudia Jones, communist activist and journalist. Within the shadows lies Dachine Rainer, poet and anarchist and Malcolm McLaren punk pioneer. We will walk and draw as we discover the lives and labours of the buried.
Sunday 2nd Nov, 2pm 5pm
Shrine to Dissent Closing Ceremony

A Drawing Exchange ceremony will take place where participants can exchange, barter and send drawn offerings to the other side, whilst improvisational band ‘the D Moon‘ play .

Lady Lucy will organise organise three Drawing Exchange Events on consecutive Friday mornings in February. They are open to anyone who wishes to attend regardless of drawing ability and skill. The Art will be in the drawing, but also taking part. These events will invite you to participate, perform and collaborate as a group and some of it will take place in public space. In the context of The Chelsea Fine Art BA course it should be of interest and appeal across all disciplines. A series of Drawing Exercises will be researched by Lady Lucy for each event and at the end of each session will we show the drawings together in a temporary exhibit . You will be encouraged to exchange your drawings with others if you wish to. All welcome, hope you can make it.

Drawing Me, Drawing You

Week One : Friday 8th February 10 am – 1 pm

A morning dedicated to the observational study of one another in motion, form and language. A series of drawing exercises will be set that experiment within the theme of Drawing Me, Drawing You.

Exercises

Dream CV

The Dream Résumé is a Surrealist technique of game. Chronicle your achievements and employment in dreams, rather than in waking life. Using your dreams write your CV, If you can’t remember your dreams, use your imagination and make it up.
Drawing Me, Drawing You.

Sitting opposite one another drawing each other and incorporating any aspect of the conversation or thoughts which take place. pick the person you know the least about in the group.

Getting to know you in text.

Swap partners. Find somebody else you don’t really know very well. Try and find something surprising out about them, by asking them inquisitive and inventive questions.

Matisse by Gertrude Stein.

Some writers have written portraits of their subjects. I am going to read you Matisse by Gertrude Stein, and I would like you to draw an imagined portrait of the artist Matisse from the text you hear.

Quickfire Questioning

One person volunteers to be the subject. The group takes it turns to ask quickfire questions about the subject whilst drawing subject, questions and answers.

10 Words a Day

I have been collecting 10 words a day and writing them in my diary.
We are going to make a collective text piece about yesterday. Write 10 words about your day yesterday and we’ll swap them over. We’ll read them out starting with the first word on your paper going round the group in a quick succession and then straight onto the next word and repeat until we’ve read and listened to all the words.

Our Social Circles

Draw circles representing your different social circles : For example, college, family, skateboarding, religion. now let’s join these and see them all together. See how they connect. What do we have in common with each other that we didn’t know about already ?

Friday 15th February 10 am – 1 pm Source the Material

A Drawing Exchange exploring the use of printed Source Material. Some SM will be provided by Lady Lucy. It will be better if you could bring some yourselves. You’ll be encouraged to go to the library to steal some too. Expect : Copying, Tracing, Cut and Paste, Collage, photocopying.

We had a discussionss about how students use different types of source material in their work and thought about artists that use source material in their work including Kim Rugg and Kurt Schwitters. We concentrated on one drawing exercise :

A walk, talk and drawing tour around some local residential buildings of architectural interest.

We will walk around some residential buildings close to Chelsea College and observe dwellings built for private, public and social purposes from the 19th and 20th century. We will encounter different types of architecture and learn about what the buildings where built for, and think about the social structures in place within and around them.

We will use Pevsner London Westminster 6 Pimlico as our guide.

The flats, squares, apartments complexes we are to encounter are fairly big in scale. We are trying to encounter a lot of information. Here are some ideas for Drawing exercises as we go between them.

A small architectural detail representing each site.
Draw using the top of the building to the skyline as your guide.
Draw the trees as they appear bigger than the buildings.
Draw a series of characters that you think currently live in the buildings.
Write down any thoughts or images that come into your head whilst we think about these spaces.
Draw how the buildings make you feel ?
What improvements would you make to these buildings – Make a drawing of your improvements, leaving out the rest of the buildings.
We’ll make some others up as we go along.

We thought about these things along the route and drew a collective map on the photocopied Pimlico Pevsner pages on our return.

The Drawing Exchange Portrait Service ~ initiated by the drawing exchange in collaboration with Open Source Pants and visitors to Black Boxx

Drawing subjects and exercises:

Inviting anyone at Blackboxx to have their portrait drawn, the drawers are anyone at Blackboxx who would like to participate and can be of any age and drawing ability. Drawing time period is from 10 to 20 minutes. The drawn can move about but not too much. At the end of the drawing we examine the drawings all together. All the drawings made are for the drawn to keep if they want them.

1_ Drawing you, drawing me ~ Sitting opposite one another drawing each other and incorporating any aspect of the conversation or thoughts which take place.

2 . power positions ~ The drawn is invited to select props and items to wear and to choose a posture which signifies a cultural archetype

3. Swap ~ During the drawing time, drawers swap each others work in progress and continue where the other left off, changing the drawing as they see fit.

4. Walking portrait service. ~ Walking around round Black Box to met people, then choosing someone to draw, we then approach them and begin drawing instantly (a portrait ambush). They are 2 to 5 minute sketches, finally we looks at works, discuss and offer to the drawn, the drawn then chooses who we should draw next.

5. Drawing strangers ~ We ask the drawn to choose someone they don’t know for us to draw, this enables us to move in and out of different social circles within Black Boxx interrupting the tendency to remain in one group.

6. Drawing exchange show ~ The works which are not given or taken by people are finally displayed on the walls of Blackboxx, people are invited to view them and also take a drawing if they like it.

Invited to work with Wimbledon BA Drawing Elective Students Drawing Exchange exercises created in response to The Wallace Collection.

Drawing Exercises for The Wallace Collection. Here are some exercises I created in response to the collection but it’s up to you, you should and can draw what you like. There is so much to think about here : So much could be relevant to you :

Exercises

Outline of a figure.
5 mins. Pick a figurative painting and on your page draw what you think the outline of the figure might be.

Colour chart map of the collection
20 mins
Walk through through the whole collection, and make a note of the predominate colour or colours in each room. Using colour pencils and block colour make a map of your findings.

Interior View for a illustration of a novel or a play.
Draw an interior view of the collection. Imagine it’s a scene in a novel or play. What date is it set who are the characters, what’s the story ?

From The Great Hall to The Miniature.
Draw an Oval, Take a section of a painting in The Great Hall and design a miniature.

10 Costumes
Survey the paintings and think about the costumes in them. On a piece of paper find and select 10 costumes that you find interesting. Make notes with the costumes.

Draw your friend in the painting
Draw your friend and put them in the composition of a painting.

Space in between objects.
Select a display of objects and concentrate on 2 objects. Make a drawing in which you can see the two objects, but that the space in between the objects is the most prominent view on the page.

Lady Lucy and Laura Mansfield explored The Southern Cemetery together Lady Lucy and members of Islington Mill Art Academy visited Weaste Cemetery in Salford where a number exercises were set and drawings drawn.
In the evening Lucy presented a photographic slideshow and accompanying talk of the explorations while everyone drew the story told.

Nunhead Cemetery Exchange Part of Nunhead Open 7 events
Lady Lucy brings The Drawing Exchange to Nunhead as part of ‘The Graveyard Tour’.
Sunday 12th September 2- 5 PM. Meet 2pm Nunhead Community Centre-then a short walk to Nunhead Cemetery.

Exercises

Stairway to Heaven
Side By Side, but not by choice
Headstone Character Portraits
Music Hall Mausoleum

Within the Church cafe a map of Bristol in the 17th century hangs upon the wall, this is where this drawing exchange will begin. We will also climb the tower to receive a bird’s eye view of the city below. How might the city look in the next 100 years? What are our visions and ideas for a future city? What space is scared to us in the present makeup of the city? We will explore these questions, drawing upon images of Bristol that span time and imaging future visions of Bristol City.

At one time the river ran past St Stephens church and the church was a focal point for the returning and departing ships, embarking on trade, passage and voyage. The drawing walk will reflect on this time. Looking at the past and present remains of an era where trade was ravenous and ruthless, where people were sold along with all other ‘things’ of value.

The walk will look into stories of people, plants and animals that arrived via the premise of trade, we’ll also look at the river that bore much to the banks of Bristol City.

the tour

At St Stephen Church lays the remains of two Inuit’s from the North east Baffin islands of Canada. They were captured and brought to bristol by merchant Frobisher in 1577.

In the museum Alfred’s skin remains. He was Bristols most famous Gorilla taken from the Congo in 1930.

In the university Gardens Mulberry trees grow. A Chinese tree, stolen to England in an attempt to infiltrate the Silk worm trade.

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The Drawing Exchange is an ongoing independent artist project by Kayle Brandon and Lady Lucy, predominantly exploring drawing experiences in social, participatory and public contexts with the aim to enable collective and personal enquiry into experimental process led drawing methods.